RUSH: We had a couple debates over the weekend. ABC hosted it. What a joke. What an absolute atrocity this was. Here we have the United States economy, US debt is now equal to our GDP and rising. It isn’t going to be long before the entire, the totality of US debt is larger than the entire economic output of this country. Unsustainable. And yet what kind of questions do we get? We got contraception questions. We have Stephanopoulos, who wouldn’t let go of it, and it was the social issues stuff. It was pure and simple, and these are not innocent debate moderators. These are Democrat Party hacks, every one of them, moderating these debates. It was the same thing on Sunday morning with David Gregory, NBC’s Democrat political hack, with more of the same.
Here we have the country economically in great peril, and the subject matter of the debate on Saturday night largely was the social issues. And of course there’s a strategic reason for that. That’s the Democrats and the media trying to portray all of these Republicans as wacko extremists who want to be in your bedroom every night telling you what you can and cannot do.
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RUSH: Rich in White Plains, New York, welcome to the EIB, how are you, sir?
CALLER: Good, Rush. Yeah, that woman was giving me a headache, too, or starting to, anyway.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: Let me get through the requisite, “You’re the best, Rush,” ’cause that’s what I had to do. No, that’s not true. Rush, I watched every single debate so far, every minute of every debate.
RUSH: Well, you’re better than I am.
CALLER: Can we safely say that when, at these debates, the biggest applause comes when the candidates are sticking it to the moderators, that it is an indictment on how terrible the Drive-By lamestream media really is? I mean, I don’t think I’ve witnessed more consistency than I have with that fact I just stated. And I was watching Fox & Friends this morning, and they showed the dustup between Romney and Stephanopoulos that led to Stephanopoulos almost getting booed right out of the auditorium.
RUSH: Was this over the contraception business?
CALLER: Yeah, it was the contraception —
RUSH: We’ve got that. Let me find it here. Since you brought it up, I’ve got it here in the sound bite roster.
CALLER: They wouldn’t show it. They didn’t show the part where the audience rebelled.
RUSH: Yeah, I didn’t see the debate. I read about it. My first reaction when I read this was, “What in the hell?” You know, this is what they tried to sink Robert Bork with at his confirmation hearings, the Griswold case in Connecticut about contraception. What the hell kind of question is this? Where did this come from? Of course I know the answer. What Stephanopoulos was doing was simply trying to interject social issues in this to take the heat away from Obama. He doesn’t want the candidates talking about the economy and how Obama’s destroyed it and how he’s incompetent and his policies are horrible and rotten and dooming the country to a poor economic performance, so let’s go to the social issues and let’s portray these people as a bunch of Nazis.
CALLER: And this time, Rush, it wasn’t Newt who had to go after, now there’s dissension with the Drive-By Media with other candidates.
RUSH: Well, there ought to be. But I know what’s happening with the media, and I’ve told you once, folks, I am largely responsible for this. I am largely responsible for the fact that their monopoly no longer exists. And since their monopoly no longer exists, their ability to have this pretense that they’re objective is long gone. They can’t make that pretense anymore. There is no doubt now that there is no objectivity in the media. There’s no doubt that they are liberals, that they’re Democrats, and they are part of the Democrat Party. There’s no doubt now that their role is to further the Democrat Party agenda and to elect Democrat candidates, particularly nationally and House and Senate races. There’s no question that that’s their role.
Now, they were able to hide that and cover that when they had their monopoly. But now there’s all kinds of alternative media out there, and they have had to change their stripes and colors because it’s more competitive now. They face competition in terms of the agenda. It’s not competition for audience. It’s not competition for ratings, although there is that pressure. The competition they sense is in the arena of ideas and which ideas are going to triumph. And so as a result of the monopoly no longer existing, they have cast aside all the masks and all the camouflage. And this is what leads people to ask, “Why do our guys continue to go on debates hosted by these people? Why?”
There are plenty of other places that our guys could go to set up their own debates with their own moderators that would have as the primary purpose to elicit their ideas, not where they would be treated as suspects and be forced into areas of distraction. Like this silly question of contraception. There isn’t a state that bans contraception. It’s a nonissue and it was asked by George Stephanopoulos, who’s not a journalist. He’s a Bill Clinton political hack. He was one half of the Clinton war room. He’s not a journalist. There’s not even a pretense of it, anywhere. He’s a Democrat political hack and he gets away with being able to operate in the guise of being a journalist and of course along with that comes the notion he’s objective and fair and just interested in the truth or whatever ambiguous objective they claim to be interested in. That’s not at all what this is.
So this is why many people, many of our voters are saying, “Why do you keep doing these CNN and ABC and MSNBC debates?” And of course our people say, “Well, it’s good that they do, ’cause this is a good training ground. It’s a good proving ground because this is what it’s gonna be like once they’re elected president.” Well, that may be true, but the idea is to get elected. There are better ways to get your ideas out. There are better ways to make your case than to be in prison thinking that we still have to do it by way of the mainstream media. I’m telling you, we have way too many people on our side in the upper reaches of our ruling class, of our elites, who think that we’re gonna somehow have to make our case favorably in the mainstream media. We’re gonna have to do it in such a way that they don’t criticize us, otherwise we don’t have a prayer and that’s what’s guiding this.
So that’s why we have a party that sucks up to these people, stupidly and ignorantly sucks up to the media. That’s why all this takes place, because there’s this never-ending desire for approval from these people. Which is just like Harry Reid said, (paraphrasing) “What do you mean work with the Republican? My job here is to destroy him.” The media is the same thing, “What do you mean be fair to you people? My job is to see to it that you don’t win the White House.” So why would we subject ourselves to people whose job it is to see to it we don’t succeed? Because it’s good training, because it’s good education, because it’s good preparation? This is circular firing squad kind of stuff.
Anyway, here’s the bite that the caller was talking about. This the ABC debate on Saturday night. Stephanopoulos said, “Governor Romney, do you believe that states have the right to ban contraception, or is that trumped by a constitutional right to privacy?” Folks, this is a question that they asked Robert Bork, this is Griswold v. Connecticut. This is a question that Senate Democrats tried to ensnare Bork, entrap Bork into claiming that people didn’t have privacy in their bedrooms, that Bork represented a bunch of people that wanted to be spying on people in their bedrooms, making sure that they weren’t fornicating, and if they did fornicate they weren’t having abortions.
That’s exactly why they did it. And of course being early on in the new phase of this Bork didn’t really realize what was going on and answered the question within the context of the intellectual way it was asked, when all it was was a setup from the get-go. And now out of the blue can any of you tell me when the subject of contraception has come up in this campaign? Santorum mighta talked about it once, but it’s not a campaign issue. Contraception itself hasn’t been a political presidential campaign issue in I don’t know how many cycles, if ever, other than within the context of abortion, obviously. But this was nonsensical.
So, anyway, here is the sound bite.
ROMNEY: George, this is an unusual topic that you’re raising. States have a right to ban contraception? I can’t imagine a state banning contraception. I can’t imagine the circumstances where a state would want to do so and if I were a governor of a state —
STEPHANOPOULOS: (interrupting) Well, the Supreme Court had rule on this back in 1965 because a state did.
ROMNEY: — or a legislator of a state I would totally and completely oppose any effort to ban contraception. So you’re asking…? Given the fact that there’s no state that wants to do so, and I don’t know of any candidate that wants to do so, you’re asking could it constitutionally be done? We can ask our constitutionalist here. (laughter)
RUSH: It was patently obvious what this is, but Stephanopoulos wanted to continue and did continue down this ridiculous path. He said, “I’m asking you, Governor Romney: Do you believe that states have the right to ban contraception or not?”
ROMNEY: George, I don’t know whether the state has the right to ban contraception. No state wants to! I mean, the idea of you putting forward things that states might want to do that no state wants to do, and asking me whether they want to do it or not, is kind of a silly thing, I think. (wild applause)
STEPHANOPOULOS: Huh, huh, huh.
RUSH: Yeah, now that’s what the caller’s talking about. That’s the largest applause: When these people are put in their place. What should that tell you? The largest applause — and the caller is right — in these debates is when the media is put in their place. What should that tell you? It should tell you this whole silly notion of wanting to work together and get together and compromise is a crock, because if it were something the voters cared about Romney would be booed, and Newt would be booed for being “rude” to the media! If our voters wanted this mutual-getting-along business and compromise, then all of these assaults on the media would be booed. Instead they are cheered. Now, after Santorum and Romney had to endure endless questioning on gay marriage, Newt finally turned the question around.
GINGRICH: I just want to raise… Since we spent this much time all these issues, I just want to raise a point about the news media bias. You don’t hear the opposite questions asked. “Should the Catholic Church be forced to close its adoption services in Massachusetts because it won’t accept gay couples?” — which is exactly what the state has done. “Should the Catholic Church be driven out of providing charitable services in the District of Columbia because it won’t give in to secular bigotry? Should the Catholic Church find itself discriminated against by the Obama administration on key delivery of services because of the bias and the bigotry of the administration?” The bigotry question goes both ways, and there’s a lot more anti-Christian bigotry today than there is concern on the other side, and none of it gets covered by the news media.
AUDIENCE: (applause)
RUSH: And another huge applause. When the media gets hit, our voters love it — which, again, dispels this whole notion that Republican voters and American voters and the great independents want us all to agree and get along and compromise and work together. It’s all a crock.
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RUSH: Stephanopoulos got booed as he kept pursuing that line of questioning on contraception — and, again, this is Saturday night at the ABC debate. Meanwhile, none of the moderators asked a single question about the national debt. None of them asked a single question about the jobless rate. None of them asked a single question about Obama’s economic policies or the economic condition of the country. Every question, or the vast majority of them, had to do with these innocuous social issues. Here’s what happens when that occurs: You have your Northeastern Republicans watching the debate. They see Stephanopoulos asking these questions about contraception; and their reaction is, “See? We gotta get rid of the pro-lifers! We’ve gotta get them out of the party.
“We’re not gonna get rid of these questions until we get rid of these people in the pro-life movement. We’ve gotta get rid of the Christians. We’re gonna have to get rid of these people that care about this stupid social stuff — and if we don’t, we’re gonna keep losing!” That’s how the Northeastern Republicans see the debate. They don’t see that ABC and Stephanopoulos are doing purposeful damage. They don’t see that at all. “Those questions are legitimate! See, until we get rid of the these people, we’ll hear it. We can’t have Santorum in there! All he cares about is abortion. Newt and these people? We gotta get rid of them! They’re trying to ensnare Romney in this stuff.” That’s how they see it, and that’s one of the reasons why the questions are asked: To foment discord amongst Republicans at the highest levels.
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RUSH: You know what I learned from the ABC News debate? I learned that the moderators favor gay marriage, contraception for all, and abortion on demand. That’s what I learned. I learned nothing about the Republicans. I learned that the ABC News moderators don’t care about the massive debt, yearly deficits, creating private sector jobs, or depression in the housing market. ABC doesn’t care about that. I say this ’cause I assume if they were priorities they would have focused on them and asked questions about it, but I learned ABC doesn’t care about any of that.
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